Willem Dafoe: a man for all seasons
Tuesday, April 26, 2016 at 3:00PM For our impromptu Actors Month, members of Team Experience were free to choose any actor they wanted to discuss. Here's Daniel Crooke on Willem Dafoe.
Willem Dafoe is a Greek god, in the most ceramic of ways. Rather than present himself as a blank canvas, Dafoe’s vessel is a malleable lump of clay that he shapes on the kiln as the character sees fit. His fire-burnt expressions, calcified in psychic scars, detail their histories in an unrelenting mask of past, present, and future. The man is drama. But his tragic side so often overtakes the comic in the cultural consciousness that his nimble lightness often sneaks under the radar. As his performances play out in the frame, he tactfully tears at their rigid façades to reveal the far more complicated, often contradictory stories within; He’s always got a secret.
The severity for which his performances are known is only half the story. Just as his luminescent Sgt. Elias in Oliver Stone’s Platoon offsets the pitch-blackness of Tom Berenger’s sadistic Sgt, Barnes, Dafoe has an uncanny ability to hide his radiant purity behind a stalwartly strict face. For God’s sake, he defined the model of a conflicted Christ in Scorsese’s Last Temptation; doing the impossible, he reconfigured the Messiah’s pop cultural characterization as a man with a pulse, who sinned and lived off the cross. He is a duplicitous study, ready to convince you that he’s a treacherous monster until he reveals on his deathbed – over a ceremonial sip of Bean’s delicious cider – that he was a misunderstood sideliner all along.
More Willem worship after the jump...
Now is the point where I must confess that while watching Platoon many years ago, with one decidedly chill wave of the hand, Willem Dafoe stole my heart forever. Something about the effortless swagger, the cheeky ease quickly chased with a defensive rifle. In a way, he was my first celebrity crush as a young adult with a certified sexual orientation. I have felt gratified to know that in the years that have passed, several contemporary auteurs feel the same way.
Wes Anderson and Lars von Trier understand the conflicting agendas of Dafoe’s expression and utilize it to alternatingly hysterical and devastating effects. They’re not the only ones. While it’s oft remembered as Philip Seymour Hoffman’s last filmed role, Anton Corbijn’s A Most Wanted Man features a flagrantly impotent Dafoe who nonetheless holds the title of the most literally valuable player in the story. Although it’s been a few years, it couldn’t be more relevant that in today’s cinematic superhero proliferation, his brilliant scientist turned malevolent score-settler in Spider-Man remains the standard to which every comic book baddie is held, and he wrote it that way. The film itself may not match his par but The Hunter smartly rests its qualm-filled weight on his shoulders. His shifty stoicism is a sturdy mantle you can trust.
The bewitching ghoulishness that haunts his form can be exploited in a couple of ways; after all, there’s always the chance that he’s a friendly ghost. In a snarling, sneaky voice performance, his Rat in Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox snaps a tough game. He’s a sworn servant to his farm lord master, ready to toss Meryl Streep in a burlap bag if duty calls. But defeat him in battle and he’ll wistfully deliver a bedside ballad of regret, a broken, misunderstood soul whose vices sold him out to the man. You won’t find the same hidden agenda in The Grand Budapest Hotel’s muscle lackey Jopling, but Dafoe finds the fun in such unrepentant repugnancy. Stalking Jeff Goldblum in a truly menacing museum-set sequence of impending doom, his foreboding body language is the punch line to the pastiche on display. As Anderson’s prototypically exacting villain, it’s too on the nose to not be silly.
On the flip side of the coin, von Trier devilishly toys with the ulterior motives of Dafoe’s about face. Here he's far more of the phantom menace variety. Husbandly supportiveness means nothing in Antichrist when he’s secretly diagnosing you. Voicing the infamous talking fox, he brays that “chaos reigns” and the same goes for his performance as Him – acrobatically sadomasochistic, he roots into the dirty details and blinds you with his embodied eyes. But to be fair, these are not his only annihilating bits throughout the disturbed runtime. While featured far less, he pushes von Trier’s provocative buttons during Nymphomaniac as well, continuing to challenge the idea of what we do in the dark.
Soft spots manifest galore for his sturdy character work in John Wick or John Carter – a terrible film by no fault of his soothing Tars Tarkas, who knows all the answers. But at the end of the day, he’s always there in that hammock, reclined to the nines amongst the fires of war, silently reassuring you that there’s an escape from all this madness.
Previously on Actor's Month...
80s Action Hero, Current Stars Who Need an Oscar Nom, Olympian Actors, Antonio Banderas in Law of Desire, Sterling K Brown in The People vs OJ Simpson, Chris Cooper, Harrison Ford in Witness, Andrew Garfield, Brendan Gleeson, Tom Hiddleston, Jason Scott Lee, Joe Manganiello in Pee Wee's Big Holiday, Viggo Mortensen, Jack Nicholson, Ryan O'Neal, A Conversation With Gregory Peck, Matthias Schoenaerts, Michael Shannon, and Aaron Tveit.
Reader Comments (11)
No love for his role as Klaus in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou?
:(
Definitely one of those actors whose name on a cast list assures that at least one small element of the movie is a guarantee.
Love the guy. Quite unappreciated, if you ask me. Just like Ewan or Ralph.
Steven you're not alone! I too love his Klaus in TLAWSZ. 😄 One of my favourite performances of his.
Dafoe was utterly perfect in Shadow of a Vampire, and totally deserved the Oscar nomination he got for the role.
I need to second the support for Shadow of the Vampire, easily one of my very favourite performances of 2000.
I also loved him in Mississippi Burning with Gene Hackman. Looking over his filmography, I'm really appreciating his versatility, something I had never much considered before.
All those pictures make me wonder what would happen if he got in Christoph Waltz's roles.
When I read his name, I also immediately thougth of Klaus!
Dafoe deserved the Oscar for Platoon. Just sayin'.
I once sold DaFoe tickets to an off-Broadway hit in NYC (llate 90's) and he was a total charmer: nice as can be, humble as pie. So I love him. He's a good actor too!
cash: Of the actual nominees, certainly. Symbolically, though, it probably should have been Hopper. Officially for Hoosiers, but unofficially for Frank in Blue Velvet.